Add this to the pile of significant legal anticompetitive challenges that Apple faces by their in-app purchase rules.

They’ll never allow sideloading or reduce the 30%, but I expect all of this to result in a relaxing of the “can’t even mention other payment methods” rule.

— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) May 13, 2019

2020 Elections

The two liberal icons court the most important progressive stamp of approval of 2020.

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez primary is heating up.

For the second time in five days, the star freshman congresswoman is appearing alongside Bernie Sanders at a high-profile event. Rep. Ro Khanna, co-chairman of Sanders’ campaign, is talking with Ocasio-Cortez’s staff about the primary. And Sanders’ team told POLITICO that he and Ocasio-Cortez “have had phone calls.”

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Ocasio-Cortez’s work on Sanders’ 2016 campaign — and the fact that several staffers from that bid went on to work for her and the pro-Ocasio-Cortez group Justice Democrats — suggest the Vermont senator has the inside track for her coveted endorsement. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making an aggressive pitch for Ocasio-Cortez’s nod, too: She’s met with her privately and wrote a gushing essay about her for Time magazine. An aide to Warren said their teams have been in touch.

“She is excited about both of their campaigns and the ideas they are putting forward,” said Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez. He added that the congresswoman isn’t planning to endorse soon.

Khanna put it similarly: “I know [Ocasio-Cortez] has very strong positive feelings toward Sen. Sanders. I know she also has positive feelings toward Sen. Warren.”

Sanders and Warren aren’t the only candidates wooing AOC. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro have also made overtures to the first-term phenom.

“I think it’s one of the most important endorsements in America right now,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant who advised Cynthia Nixon’s left-wing gubernatorial campaign in New York. “AOC has captured the imagination of so many young people, so many women and so many nonpoliticos who really see her as a ray of light.”

Plus, Katz said, Ocasio-Cortez has a constituency that she “can really sway.”

Ocasio-Cortez has spoken positively only about Sanders and Warren when asked about the Democratic field in recent weeks. The competition between Warren and Sanders for her support represents a new front in the delicate cold war between the two for the Democratic Party’s left flank.

Landing Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement would be a coup for Warren; even getting her to hold off on formally backing Sanders might be considered a win. For Sanders, an endorsement from her would symbolize that he was consolidating his grip on the left wing of the party even with Warren, a fellow progressive populist, in the race.

Khanna said he was told that Ocasio-Cortez would decide sometime before New York’s primary next year, well after voting is underway. By then, it will likely be clear whether Sanders or Warren has a better shot at the nomination.

Like Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and Warren have spent their political careers railing against Wall Street. They also both endorsed the “Green New Deal.”

But there are differences in their ideologies that could influence Ocasio-Cortez. While Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist like Ocasio-Cortez, Warren has said she is a “capitalist to my bones.”

“I think if AOC makes an endorsement, she’ll be looking at the candidates’ closest to her governing vision and central message: naming the culprits in our nation’s ruling class and fighting for a multiracial democracy where all of us are entitled to things like health care, education and a livable planet,” said Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, which recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress. “That means policies that match the scale of our crises like single-payer ‘Medicare for All’ and a Green New Deal.”

The issue of representation of women in government could also play a role in Ocasio-Cortez’s decision. When asked about the 2020 primary by The Intercept earlier this year, she spoke about “the power of identity” and said “it’s great that we have multiple female presidential candidates.”

In a CNN interview last week, Ocasio-Cortez said she was entertaining the idea of endorsing someone in the primary, but “it’s not going to be for a while.”

“What I would like to see in a presidential candidate is one that has a coherent worldview and logic from which all these policy proposals are coming forward,” she said. “I think Sen. Sanders has that. I also think Sen. Warren has that.”

She made similar comments in a Yahoo podcast last month. “I’m very supportive of Bernie,” she said. “I also think that what Elizabeth Warren has been bringing to the table is truly remarkable.”

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted recently that former Vice President Joe Biden’s forthcoming climate policy, which was described in a news report as a “middle-ground” approach, is a “deal-breaker.”

Ocasio-Cortez is appearing with Sanders Monday at a rally for the Green New Deal. Last Thursday, she and Sanders introduced a plan to take on predatory lenders. Sanders live-streamed a discussion of the proposal with Ocasio-Cortez on his social media accounts, attracting nearly 860,000 views on Twitter and Facebook.

During the 2018 midterm election cycle, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders rallied for progressives candidates together. In December, Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at a town hall event on climate change.

“AOC has much deeper ties to Sanders,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, a Sanders backer who founded the socialist magazine Jacobin and is a former vice chairman of Democratic Socialists of America. “She credits her going into politics to Sanders and the Sanders campaign.”

Warren, meanwhile, met privately with Ocasio-Cortez in Washington in March. A Warren staffer said “it was a good conversation” and that their staffs have been in contact since then. Warren’s team also sat down with Shahid.

And last month, Warren penned a flattering article about Ocasio-Cortez for Time’s list of 100 most influential people, saying the congresswoman “fought back against a rigged system and emerged as a fearless leader in a movement committed to demonstrating what an economy, a planet and a government that works for everyone should look like.” Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed Warren’s plan to break up big tech companies and has cosponsored several of the senator’s bills.

Ocasio-Cortez “knows her support base likes both of them. She knows the only thing brighter than her spotlight is the 2020 presidential spotlight,” said Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is supporting Warren. “So it would be shocking if she did anything other than work with both Warren and Bernie in the foreseeable future to shine the spotlight on issues they all care about — and force the rest of the Democratic Party to respond.”

Trade

GOP senators have no plans to even try to stop a trade war they oppose.

The GOP is starting to give up on thwarting Donald Trump’s trade agenda.

Senate Republicans acknowledge that the president’s latest levies on Chinese imports are harming farm state economies, their own constituents and some of Trump’s most reliable voters. But there’s no plan to stop, or even threaten, the president’s tariff regime — just the latest example of Trump imposing his protectionist will on a party that once celebrated free trade.

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As the stock market tanked on Monday following the escalating conflict with China, Republicans lamented the state of affairs. But after trying, unsuccessfully, to get the president to remove his year-old tariffs on U.S. allies, there’s little appetite for opening a new front with Trump when it comes to China.

So the GOP on Monday stuck to the same message: The tariffs are bad, but at least this time, Trump is taking on China instead of Canada or Mexico.

“They can feel it. The farm community up ‘til now has really supported the president without flinching. But eventually you flinch,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the No. 4 GOP leader whose state is a major soybean producer. Yet he concluded: “If you’re going to have a trade fight, the trade fight to have would be the China fight.”

Farmers are “disappointed but, you know, recognizing that China is the one that is forcing this,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

Trump showed little regard for the GOP’s worries on Monday as he advised Americans to avoid buying Chinese products to avoid the tariffs then later bragged that the tariffs are taking in billions of dollars — ignoring that consumers pay those fees, not China.

“I love the position we’re in,” he said. “It’s working out really well.”

Republicans would disagree but have no apparent will to challenge the president over the matter.

Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has vowed to block the president’s new North American trade deal as long as steel and aluminum tariffs remain on Mexico and Canada, but Trump has ignored his ultimatum.

On Monday, Grassley admitted that Congress has ceded too much power to the White House on trade, but he declined to say whether his committee would do anything about it. He offered the gentlest of guidance to Trump, urging him to work with allies on the China fight, and ordered China “to get real.”

It’s a widely held view among Republicans: Past Congresses granted the White House too much authority and now there’s nothing they can do about it.

“The retaliatory tariffs will have a significant consequence to Kansans,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). He said the Senate can only do so much besides make their case to the White House: “Really this authority rests in the president.”

That’s a view that ignores Congress’ power to rein in the president or confront him through legislation. But the GOP is in no mood to get into it with Trump after blocs of Senate Republicans defied him on his national emergency declaration, criticized his foreign policy and tanked his two Federal Reserve hopefuls. A number of Republicans are up for reelection and sweating potential primary challenges if they cross Trump.

Instead, Republicans seem to be relying on Trump’s conservative base in agricultural states to deliver the president a message. Asked who can determine when the economic pain from retaliatory tariffs is too much to stand, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said “it’s up to the producers.”

“They can’t produce soybeans and actually make a profit today. Five years in a row, farmers’ prices are down 50 percent since 2013. This is a very serious thing, and these are the president’s people. They want him to be successful. But there’s a limit to how long they can hang in there,” Rounds said.

The steel and aluminum tariffs on North American and European allies have drawn far more GOP opposition because they were imposed on the dubious basis of national security. Some Republicans have sought to restrict those “section 232” tariffs, but GOP leaders have declined to consider legislation that would tie Trump’s hands.

The GOP pushback has been far weaker on Trump’s China offensive, even though the results have been just as damaging. Beijing is imposing new 25 percent tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. imports in the face of Trump’s new levies on $200 billion in Chinese goods.

“The president’s right to hold China’s feet to the fire on this,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). “They wouldn’t be negotiating at all if it weren’t for what the president has done of course I’d like to see a deal done.”

Still, many Republicans are once again worried about economic headwinds, and the stock market is looking shaky. Rural America, where Trump is popular, could be headed for ruin.

But after complaining about Trump’s trade policies for more than two years, the only thing new in the GOP is a sense of resignation and a sense that confrontational stances toward Trump in the past have not paid off.

“It’s a lot of uncertainty. Some anxiety. And obviously that’s reflected in the stock market,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Trump has “got a lot of power when it comes to those tariffs so we’re just trying to work with him.”

Though they frequently complain, Republicans have been loath to cross Trump on trade, one of the most sensitive rifts with the party. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squelched an effort last Congress to give lawmakers the power to block Trump’s national security-based tariffs, and two of the most fervent backers of that efforts, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, have retired.

There’s still plenty of unease about the tariffs on U.S. allies, but the moment for action seems to have passed. Now that Trump has turned to China, Republicans are even less inclined to confront Trump over a trade war with a country widely blamed for stealing intellectual property from the United States. Many senators are also still worried Trump could impose new tariffs on foreign autos, which would strike at factories in Southern states that are mostly represented by Republicans.

Perhaps most importantly, Republicans stopped being surprised when the president makes good on a protectionist trade policy he’s been touting for nearly four years now.

The new tariffs on China were “the worst kept secret in America,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). “If it was a secret.”

Health care

Republicans are being pulled to the left by the White House embrace of Democrats’ ideas.

Conservatives howled when Democrats pitched importing drugs from Canada and giving the U.S. government a more active hand negotiating with drugmakers to drive costs down.

But since President Donald Trump pitched both of those ideas a year ago in his blueprint for lowering drug prices, the conversation has shifted.

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Drug costs remain stubbornly high, but when conservative leaders like Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are embracing previously “liberal” ideas like reimporting drugs from Canada, something has changed.

“Republicans no longer simply can be counted on to be a permanent ally of the industry,” said Bill Pierce, a former George W. Bush administration health official who works with health industry clients, including drugmakers.

The momentum may yet fizzle with the 2020 election looming. House Democratic leaders last week packaged a pair of narrow bipartisan bills addressing drug prices with a separate set of provisions to fortify Obamacare markets, a combination that’s likely to be a non-starter for the chamber’s Republicans when it comes to the floor this week.

But on drug prices in general, there’s been “this remarkable mind-meld” that seemed implausible even a year ago, said Ben Ippolito, an economist who focuses on health policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “The fact that the administration is actively working to help Florida in their drug importation efforts, I would not have believed that a year ago.”

Trump last week urged the Department of Health and Human Services to give DeSantis, a Trump ally, assistance in getting a Canadian import program up and running in Florida, forcing HHS Secretary Alex Azar — who used to describe importation as a “gimmick” — to express openness as long as it can be done safely and save money.

Trump’s FDA last week also made it easier for drugmakers to develop, and for patients to access, cheaper versions of certain high-costs drugs like insulin — the object of intense congressional scrutiny.

Whether or how much any of this actually lowers drug prices is an open question.

Ippolito noted that some of the administration’s proposals that are the furthest along are “also the ones that are relatively unlikely” to ratchet down prices. That includes the proposal, released last week, to require TV drug ads to disclose prices, and a rule expected to be finalized soon to eliminate manufacturers’ rebates in Medicare Part D, the outpatient prescription drug program.

Trump has pushed Republicans into a corner, causing many to give up the fight on policies they opposed in the past. But it’s not clear the administration will be able to keep them in line as some of its most controversial ideas start morphing from blueprints to actual legislation or formal rulemaking.

“There’s been a lot of motion. But not all motion is progress,” said David Mitchell, president of Patients for Affordable Drugs.

An administration plan to link Medicare payments for drugs that doctors administer in a hospital or other health care setting — not bought retail and taken at home — to an index of lower international prices could be the most effective in terms of lowering drug spending.

“If you think of proposals that are on the table, this is the one that would have the most immediate impact to actually lower the prices of some of our most expensive prescription drugs,” said Mitchell.

Many Republicans are conspicuously quiet on the ambitious, non-market-based plan — a positive sign for Trump given how vigorously Republican lawmakers (and some Democrats) opposed President Barack Obama’s much less radical plan to change these payments. Still, some are dubbing the proposal “government price controls,” and stoking fear that it would curb patient access.

“The skepticism is usually when you have price controls, they guarantee scarcity,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “And we don’t want to limit people’s access to life-saving drugs any more than we want to destroy innovation by some unintended effect.”

“I’m not in favor of imposing price controls,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “I think that would be a disaster.”

Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley’s attempts to rally formal opposition to the proposal have stagnated, signaling conservative hesitation to go against the administration. Azar intervened with lawmakers to stop rising opposition last year, and Grassley (R-Iowa), who has been critical of the pharmaceutical industry in many respects, now refuses to comment until the plan is formally proposed.

One Republican outlier, Florida freshman Rick Scott, has introduced his own legislation to tie U.S. drug prices to the lowest prices found among five countries: Canada, France, the U.K., Japan and Germany. “We’ve got to get something done,” Scott, a close Trump ally, told POLITICO.

But these are not traditionally conservative ideas, and “Republicans are just kind of staying quiet,” said John Leppard, of Washington Analysis, which tracks how public policy impacts Wall Street. “I think it gives the administration more of a free rein to do what they want on the regulatory side,” though Republicans may not be interested in legislating. And he thinks that if deals aren’t struck fast, it gets harder to legislate as the election approaches.

“I’m dubious that this is something Republicans and Democrats want to scream kumbaya on … and give each other a win, “ he added.

Some initiatives seem to be rolling forward. Republicans and the drug industry are putting up much smaller fights than in the past, or even voting to approve bills like those that ban certain drug industry patent settlements that can keep generic drug competition off the market (pay-for-delay) or legislation that would make it harder for brand drug companies to use FDA-mandated safety programs to stall generics (the CREATES Act).

The new environment and Trump’s steady focus on drug prices have caused Republicans and industry groups like PhRMA and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization to consider whether to support these bills in order to ward off bigger changes like government negotiation on prices.

But even bills now considered lower-hanging fruit are running into political hurdles from Democrats emboldened by the administration’s appetite for change. Next week, the House will vote on a combined package of bills to lower drug prices and to bolster the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, making Republicans unlikely to vote for the measures. House Democratic leaders worry that allowing a bipartisan vote on relatively minor drug pricing bills would let the GOP claim victory on the issue. They also worry that Republicans will then refuse to negotiate on broader proposals that could more directly lower drug prices, according to an individual familiar with the strategy.

And Democrats are rising in opposition to one of Trump’s furthest developed plans — to eliminate the rebates brand drug companies pay health insurance companies in Medicare and Medicaid. HHS argues this will lead drug companies to lower the price of their products, but independent analyses from the Congressional Budget Office and others have found that is unlikely and that the plan will raise the cost of health care for the government and many Americans.

“What’s really going to count is list prices,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has led bipartisan Senate investigations into high prices with Grassley. “And they’re just not willing to go there and get confrontational with the companies.”

The administration’s focus on eliminating rebates doesn’t impact drug companies’ prices or profits, Wyden added — a common refrain among critics of the administration blueprint.

Days ahead of the one-year mark for Trump’s plan, the administration finalized an industry-opposed rule requiring drugmakers to include prices in direct-to-consumer advertising and took a victory lap.

“When we introduced the president’s blueprint last May, there were some skeptics. It’s just a bunch of ideas, some said. Someone even made fun of how many question marks there were in the blueprint itself,” Azar said on a press call Monday. “Now, about a year to the day from that announcement, we finalized this rule, and we’ve put forth proposals for every major idea we laid out that day. Those question marks are turning into check marks.”

Yet Democrats and Republicans alike largely agree that many of the next steps will have to come from Congress.

“I think it’s probably like every administration that’s proposed [a policy blueprint]. They’ve got to get it through Congress,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

“You can’t blame this one on the president. It’s Congress that is sitting on its ice-cold lazy butt and doing nothing,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) said.

And most say it will be years before the drug pricing agenda can be fairly evaluated.

“The sign of permanent change is when the change that was created lasts from one administration to the next,” said Pierce.

“We didn’t get to where we are in two years or five years … this is 25 years in the making, so we aren’t going to change anything in one or two years even if we pass law,” he added.